Photonics Media is pleased to once again be the media sponsor of the Technology Transfer Program, to be held on the CLEO:2013 show floor from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 13. This year’s program features a tutorial, a showcase of technologies available for transfer, and a keynote speaker as well as tabletop displays during exhibit hours. To kick off the program, Photonics Media Senior Editor Melinda Rose will introduce the moderator of the day’s events. First on the agenda will be “Technology Transfer 101: Technology Licensing and Tech Startups.” Speakers include: • Eugene Cochran, senior licensing associate and sector director of physical sciences at the University of Arizona, who will present “University of Arizona’s Proof of Concept Funding Process.” • Anis Rahman, founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Applied Research & Photonics, who will follow up with “Surviving the Valley of Death for a New Technology Company: Diffusion Model Prediction.” The keynote speaker will be Robert A. Norwood, a professor in the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. His talk, “A Tale of Two Companies: It Was the Best of Times; It Was the Worst of Times,” will cover the birth-to-near-death tale of a photonics startup, from funding to the eventual management buyout of Photon-X, where Norwood served as vice president and CTO. Can’t get enough tech transfer? The May 23 CLEO Technology Transfer preview webinar, featuring Don Golini, president of Sanica Ventures LLC, and Mark Gallagher, a partner in Knobbe Martens IP law firm, and hosted by Photonics Media, can be accessed on demand at photonics.com/webinars. In this issue of Photonics Spectra, science writer Valerie C. Coffey navigates a trip on “The Road from R&D to Commercialization,” beginning on page 56. She writes: When US legislators formed NASA in the late 1950s, exploring space and landing a man on the moon were not its only missions. In a burst of foresight and efficiency, they specified another mission: that any innovation engendered by the space program be captured, recorded, patented and made useful down on Earth. Thus began the era of technology transfer. In our cover story, contributing editor Marie Freebody writes about imaging systems deployed to farm fields and the skies above them to relay evidence of crop conditions. In “Farmers Fuel Growing Market for Imaging Systems,” on page 38, she writes: Climate change, population growth and increasingly scarce resources are putting agriculture under pressure. Farmers need to be savvy with their land, harvesting as much as possible from the smallest possible space – a new phase in farming known as “precision agriculture.” And photonics is one of the key contributors. That’s just a taste of the features we have served up in this issue. I hope you enjoy it. If you attend CLEO, I hope you’ll stop by booth #2027 and say hello.